“How on earth did you find this place?” Bella asks. She’d been given no address, just told to follow. They’d snaked through so many narrow back alleys on their way, she’d lost her sense of direction.
“Adam found it,” Anna says, striking a match over and over without a spark. “Through the Underground,” she adds. “Apparently they’ve used it before, as a sort of safe house. It’s abandoned, so we shouldn’t have any surprise visitors.” Finally, a match takes, emitting a cloud of sharp-smelling sulphur and an amber halo of light. “Adam said he left a candle by the faucet,” she mutters, shuffling toward the sink, a hand cupped over the flame. Adam had found the rabbi, too, which Bella knew was no easy task. When Lvov fell, the Soviets stripped the city’s rabbis of their titles and banned them from practicing; those who were unable to find new jobs went into hiding. Yoffe was the only rabbi Adam could find, he said, who wasn’t afraid to officiate a marriage ceremony, under the condition that the wedding take place in secrecy.
In the match’s faint glow, the room begins to take shape. Bella looks around, at the shadow of a kettle resting on a stove top, a bowl of wooden spoons silhouetted on the counter, a blackout curtain hanging in a window over the sink. Whoever lived here left in a hurry, it seems. “It’s incredibly kind of Adam to do this for us,” Bella says, more to herself than to her sister. She’d met Adam a year ago, when he leased a room in the Kurcs’ apartment. Mostly she knew him as Halina’s boyfriend, calm and cool and rather quiet—oftentimes his voice was barely heard around the dinner table. But since arriving in Lvov, Adam has surprised Bella with his ability to orchestrate the impossible: handcrafting false identification cards for the family. As far as the Russians know, Adam works at an orchard outside the city, harvesting apples—but in the Underground, he has become a prized counterfeiter. By now, hundreds of Jews have pocketed his IDs, which he produces with such a meticulous hand, Bella would swear they are real.
She’d asked him once how he was able to make them look so authentic.
“They are authentic. The stamps, at least,” he’d said, explaining how he’d discovered that he could remove official government stamps from existing IDs with a peeled, just-boiled egg. “I lift the original when the egg is still hot,” Adam said, “then roll the egg over the new ID. Don’t ask why, but it works.”
“Found it!” Darkness envelops them once again as Anna fumbles for another match. A moment later, the candle is lit.
Bella removes her coat, lays it over the back of a chair.
“Cold in here,” Anna whispers. “Sorry.” Carrying the candle, she makes her way from the sink to stand beside Bella.
“It’s okay.” Bella suppresses a shiver. “Is Jakob already here? And Genek? Herta? It’s so quiet.”
“Everyone’s here. Getting settled in the foyer, I imagine.”
“So I’m not to be married in the kitchen?” Bella laughs and then sighs, realizing that for as many times as she’d told herself she’d marry Jakob anywhere, the idea of wedding him here, in the shadowy, ghostlike home of a family she’ll never know, was beginning to make her feel uneasy.
“Please. You’re far too classy for a kitchen wedding.”
Bella smiles. “I didn’t think I’d be nervous.”
“It’s your wedding day—of course you’re nervous!”
The words reverberate through her and Bella goes still. “I wish Mother and Father could be here,” she says finally, and as she hears herself, her eyes well up with tears. She and Jakob had talked about waiting until the war was over to marry, so they could hold a more traditional ceremony in Radom with their families. But there was no telling when the war would end. They’d waited long enough, they decided. The Tatars and the Kurcs had both given their blessings from Radom. They’d practically begged Jakob and Bella to marry. Still, Bella hates that her parents can’t be with her—hates that, despite how happy she is now that she’s with Jakob, she’s also guilty for it. Is it right, she wonders, to celebrate while her country is at war? While her parents are alone in Radom—her parents, who, for all of her life, have given her so much when they had so little? Bella’s memory flashes to the day when she and Anna returned home from school to find their father in the living room with a scruffy-looking dog at his feet. The pup was a gift, their father told them, from one of his patients who had fallen on hard times and was unable to pay to have a tooth extracted. Bella and Anna, who had begged for a dog since they were toddlers, had shrieked with joy and rushed to hug their father, who wrapped his arms around them, laughing as the dog nipped playfully at their ankles.
Anna squeezes her hand. “I know,” she says, “I wish they could be here, too. But they want this so badly for you. You mustn’t worry about them. Not tonight.”
Bella nods. “It’s just so far from what I imagined,” she whispers.
“I know,” Anna says again, her voice soft.
When they were teenagers, Bella and Anna would lie in bed and talk for hours, concocting stories of their wedding days. At the time, Bella could see it perfectly: the sweet-smelling bouquet of white roses her mother would arrange for her to carry; the smile on her father’s face as he lifted her veil to kiss her forehead beneath the chuppah; the thrill of Jakob slipping a ring over her index finger, a symbol of their love that she would carry with her for the remainder of her lifetime. Her wedding, had it been in Radom, would have been far from lavish, this she knows. It would have been simple. Beautiful. What it would not have been was a secret ceremony, held in the cold carcass of an abandoned, blacked-out house 500 kilometers from her parents. But, Bella reminds herself, she’d chosen to come to Lvov, after all. She and Jakob had decided together to marry here. Her sister is right; her parents have wanted this for her for years. She should focus on what she has, not what she doesn’t—on this night, especially.
“No one could have predicted this,” Anna adds. “But just think,” she says, her voice growing more chipper, “the next time you see Mama i Tata, you will be a married woman! Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Bella smiles, willing away her tears. “It is, in a way,” she whispers, thinking about her father’s letter, which had arrived two days ago. In it, Henry described how overjoyed he and Gustava were upon learning of her intent to marry. We love you so much, dear Bella. Your Jakob is a good soul, that boy, with a fine family. We will celebrate, all of us, when we are together again. Rather than show the letter to Jakob right away, Bella had slipped it under her pillow and decided she’d let him read it later that evening, once they’d returned to their apartment, a married couple.
Sucking in her stomach, Bella runs her hands along the lace bodice of her dress. “I’m so happy it fits,” she says, exhaling. “It’s just as beautiful as I remember it.”